I have just completed Corey Schafer’s Flask blog tutorial and want to host it. In his tutorials, he suggests using Linode for this, which costs $5/month for the lowest shared plan.
However, I’ve also noticed that CloudFlare offers free hosting and seems quite user-friendly (you can connect your GitHub account and upload easily.
Are there any downsides to using CloudFlare for this? My app doesn’t need to be highly functional, as it will mainly be for personal use and sharing with a few friends and colleagues.
The blog uses Flask and SQLAlchemy for the database.
Honestly, you could just flip a coin to decide where to host and then quickly write a script to test how it handles traffic. Cloudflare already manages a lot of basic stuff like rate limiting and caching. I’m not very familiar with Linode since most of my clients use AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or platforms like Heroku and DigitalOcean, but I’m sure Linode covers everything you need.
If you want to save $5, check out Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean, or AWS for their free tier offers. Many of these services provide at least a year of free hosting for a basic machine that can handle a small blog.
Another option is to create a static site and host it on cheap or free cloud storage. This involves generating all your website’s pages as HTML files, like old-school websites. Whenever you add a new blog post, you update your local database and regenerate the site, syncing it to your cloud storage using some simple scripting. This method is cost-effective, reliable, and low-maintenance for static content. You might want to look into tools like Pelican or Frozen-Flask for this approach.
The key takeaway is to just get it hosted. Users don’t care where it’s hosted; they just want it to work. Once it’s up, send me the link. If you get it done before Friday at 17:00 UTC, there’s a shiny gold coin waiting for you.
If you can get it up and running for free on Cloudflare, that’s great. However, I’m not sure if it functions like a traditional server. It lets you run serverless code, but you might not have much control over other aspects. If that’s a concern, you might want to check out Google Compute; they offer a free tier for a VPS server that you can use.
For a personal blog that’s not too busy, I would suggest going with the free Cloudflare Pages hosting instead of paying for Linode. Here’s why:
Cloudflare is completely free for low-traffic personal sites, so you can save $5 a month. Setting it up is straightforward—just link your GitHub account, and your code will be built and deployed automatically. Plus, with Cloudflare’s global CDN, your site will load quickly for visitors around the world without needing extra server tweaks. It also provides automatic HTTPS encryption to keep your site secure.
You might also consider Persumi (https://persumi.com), which offers free hosting for blogs and lets you concentrate on writing rather than managing technical details.
The main trade-off is that you won’t have full control over the server environment as you would with Linode. But for a simple blog, either Cloudflare or Persumi’s free tier should work perfectly. If you have any other questions, just let me know!